Inspiration Archive

December 9, 2024

Flow — Beautifully animated and quite moving, Flow was wonderful. Took the kiddos over the weekend and we loved it. The film is entirely without dialogue and yet succeeds to tell a moving story, and the animal behavior was captured perfectly. This is really a special film and I highly recommend it.
NORCO — “A Southern Gothic point & click narrative adventure that immerses the player in the sinking suburbs and verdant industrial swamps of a distorted South Louisiana.” Visually stunning.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle — Spent a thoroughly enjoyable several hours muttering “it should be in a museum!” to myself while bashing in the skulls of fascists with brooms and candlesticks and anything else I could find, so, yeah, good game so far.
Pageboy — “Build a static site from plain HTML, no templating or command line required.” Tiny app that lives in your menubar and spins up a static website for you. This is a simple, great little tool.

August 14, 2024

Dot — “The AI that grows with you.” I’ll admit I’m extremely bearish on AI assistants, so it was with a heavy dose of skepticism that I installed and tried Dot, but I was pleasantly surprised by the kind, supportive tone and interesting conversations I’ve had in the past few weeks. One downside is that currently Dot is iOS-only, which means you cannot continue interactions on macOS. This will change with Sequoia in the fall, when it’s possible to mirror iPhone to your Mac. Consider the experiment ongoing…
Tuneshine — I’m such a sucker for bespoke, purpose-driven hardware ideas, especially when they involve a combination of software and funky displays. Tuneshine lights up your room with the album artwork from the songs you listen to, with support for various music services including Apple Music. It’s like a digital record album cover on the shelf in my office.
Record Club — Speaking of music, I’m super excited about Record Club, the self-proclaimed “Letterboxd but for music”. I’ve missed the early-aughts days of eMusic and Rdio when I could easily discover new music from friends and strangers. Record Club seems like the perfect fit. Invitations are rolling out slowly, but I’m looking forward to the site growing rapidly over the coming months.
Still Wakes the Deep — “December 1975. Disaster strikes the Beira D oil rig off the coast of Scotland.” While Still Wakes the Deep doesn’t exactly set out on a unique path to its horror—you’ll find a fairly typical “something went wrong and now everything is falling apart” setup at play here—walking the path is immersive and disturbing. Where it is most successful is in its narrative, vocal performances and gorgeous visuals, which come together to elevate that which might have otherwise been a simple, rote horror into something poetic, heartbreaking and moving.

January 26, 2024

Midnight — A remarkably well-designed alarms app for iOS. Supports Critical Alerts (so it’s guaranteed to ring regardless of Focus mode, and an awesome “Wake-up mission” feature to make it that much harder to silence for heavy snoozers.
Copilot — Perhaps I was one of the few people still using Mint when Intuit announced they’re killing the product this year, but the truth is I’ve disliked Mint for years and only used it out of inertia. When I went looking for a modern alternative, Copilot was highly recommended and for good reason. It’s native on both iOS and macOS, the user experience attention to deal is top-notch, and it’s a delight to use.
Infinite Mac — “A collection of classic Macintosh system releases and software, all easily accessible from the comfort of a (modern) web browser."
Viewfinder — “Challenge perception, redefine reality, and reshape the world around you with an instant camera.” One of the more jaw-dropping game mechanics of recent years, and so much fun to play.

January 26, 2023

Ivory by Tapbots — The seminal third-party Twitter app, transformed and improved, ready to be your mobile client of choice as you migrate to the better place, Mastodon. macOS version coming soon, too!
Mac 30th Anniversary Icons — SVG icons extracted from the 30th Anniversary Mac Font. Now you can finally create a nice icon header for your personal weblog all about the PowerBook Duo 210 from 1992.
The Last of Us — One of the best video game series in recent memory, now on the not-so-small screen. Seems incredibly faithful and well-written. Very hopeful they keep the quality level as high as the pilot throughout the remainder of the first season, and that we get to see Part Two soon after.
Echo Wolf — Synthwave music and vibes from designer Trent Walton. His new track, Protoblade, drops 1/27/23. Trent also also released lots of great music over the years eponimously on Spotify.
Chronophoto — Try to guess which year photos were taken. It’s a fun little game, but also an amazing time capsule of photography from the past 120 years. My personal high score is 4003.

November 29, 2022

Introducing Inspiration, a new feature on Karbon Based
In which we relive the heyday of blogging with a more-regularly-updated linked list of interesting things I’ve found or enjoyed. The focus of Karbon Based will remain long-form writing (something I’ve completely failed to do for three years), but inspirations in this space will be constant and fleeting, then moved to the archive for perpetuity.
akinterest — Joshua Blankenship compiles another chapter of his visual inspiration board. I highly recommend traversing back through the previous chapters as well, there’s so much to take in.
glyphs — A simple but beautifully rendered list of common unicode glpyhs for easy clipboard copying. I’ve found myself using this a lot over the past few weeks. traf makes Framer look more and more viable as a way to make modern websites.
Warp — “A blazingly fast, Rust-based terminal reimagined from the ground up to work like a modern app.” I use a terminal every day, and didn’t realize just how much I wanted an AI command search and command-based navigation.
1899 — I absolutely loved Jantje Friese and Baran bo Odar’s previous Netflix series Dark, so I’m very excited to dig into their new series about an immigrant ship headed for New York.